August 2, 2019 – Sugar and Cancer

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Anchor lead: Consumption of sugary drinks may increase your cancer risk, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Consumption of sugary drinks, whether those are soft drinks or fruit juices, may up your risk of cancer, a recent study in the British Medical Journal found. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says this increased risk may be related to obesity, already known to increase cancer risk.

Nelson: Sugary beverages, there are so many of them now, not just regular soft drinks but there’s energy drinks, and various different fruit juices. In these sugary beverages the ability to get sugar from the beverage into the bloodstream very quickly is critical. These rapid acting ones, this is responsible in great part for the obesity epidemic. I think obesity, sugary beverages and carbohydrate intake are probably reasonably tightly related. The other is the notion that when taken in this way, driving obesity they tend to be somewhat pro-inflammatory.  :33

Nelson says more research is clearly needed to prove a link between sugar consumption and cancer risk. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.